What You Need

My Five Senses (Let's-Read-and-Find-Out Science 1) by Aliki

My Five Senses Chart

Pictures of an Eye, Ear, Nose, Mouth, and Hands

Old Magazines or a copy of the chart at the beginning of My Five Senses

What To Do

Read My Five Senses. Talk with the preschoolers about the different things that they can experience with each of their five senses. Explain that sometimes people do not have all five of their senses. Tell the preschoolers that there are people who cannot see or cannot hear. Ask the preschoolers what life would be like if they were missing one of their five senses.

Print My Five Senses Chart. Help each preschooler add pictures of an eye, ear, nose, mouth, and hands above the matching category. Have preschoolers cut pictures of objects out of magazines and determine what sense they use to experience each object. Give preschoolers glue and help them to glue each picture where it belongs on the chart.

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Helpful Tips for Parents

• Choose toys that grow with the child: open-ended materials (blocks, clay, art supplies) remain valuable for years; single-use toys with one correct answer produce brief engagement.

• Involve children in planning: menus, weekend activities, family projects. Decision-making and planning are executive function skills that predict long-term academic success.

• Children's questions are assessment data. The questions a child asks reveal their current conceptual level and what they're ready to learn next.

• Read aloud daily for at least 15 minutes. This single habit is the strongest predictor of kindergarten reading readiness and long-term academic success.

• Answer "why" questions fully and honestly. A child who gets real answers to their questions develops deeper curiosity than one whose questions are dismissed or oversimplified.

Frequently Asked Questions

When should formal education begin for preschoolers?

Play-based learning is the developmentally appropriate educational mode for children from birth through age 6–7. Formal academic instruction (sitting at desks, worksheets, direct phonics drills) before age 6 consistently produces short-term knowledge gains but long-term motivation losses. The children with the richest preschool play experiences often outperform academically drilled peers by age 8, when the developmental advantage of play-based executive function development becomes apparent in school performance.

How do I know if my preschooler is learning enough at home?

Developmental milestones (not academic benchmarks) are the appropriate assessment tool for preschoolers. Verify your child is meeting age-appropriate milestones for language, motor, social-emotional, and cognitive development using your pediatrician's well-child visit assessments. Preschoolers learning through play, conversation, books, and daily life engagement are learning more than their standardized test scores will later reflect. Concern is warranted if a child shows regression in skills previously mastered, or fails to meet speech and language milestones.

Related reading: See also our writing readiness guide and our alphabet activities for more ideas on this topic.

🎓 Skills Your Child Will Develop

• ⚡ Executive Function — Planning, sequencing steps, holding rules in mind while acting, and stopping a prepotent response all build executive function — the cluster of cognitive skills most strongly predictive of long-term academic and life success.
• 🤔 Critical Thinking — Being asked "why do you think that?" and forming and defending an answer develops the analytical reasoning children need for reading comprehension, mathematics, and evidence-based argumentation.
• ✏️ Pre-Writing Development — Drawing, tracing, and early mark-making develop the fine motor control and visual-motor integration that handwriting requires — making every drawing activity a contribution to writing readiness.
• 📖 Story Structure Understanding — Understanding that stories have a beginning, problem, solution, and ending develops narrative comprehension — the mental schema children use to make sense of increasingly complex texts throughout their school years.

This preschool science activity is a wonderful companion to "My Five Senses" by Aliki or as a stand alone science activity. Preschoolers will learn all about their five senses and the things that they can experience with them.

There are so many different ways that preschoolers can experience the world around them. Learning about their five senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch helps them to realize all the different ways that they can learn about the world and the things that are in it.

Questions to Ask Your Child

Use these open-ended prompts to extend the learning during or after the activity:

• "What was the most interesting thing you learned today?"
• "Can you explain this to a stuffed animal as if they've never heard of it?"
• "What part do you want to practice more?"
• "How is this connected to something you already know?"
• "What would you want to learn more about?"
• "If you were the teacher, what would you tell the class about this?"

There are no right or wrong answers to any of these questions. The goal is to keep the conversation going, model curious thinking, and give your child practice putting their experience into words.